News Roundup

France’s government became the first national government to endorse the UN Open Source Principles, joined by 19 additional organizations. Backers include Creative Commons, the Drupal Association, SUSE, the WordPress Foundation, and Mercedes-Benz AG. The UN’s Open Source United community will promote eight guidelines for open source development and sharing across UN agencies and beyond.

Secret Login is a new Drupal module by Vishal Kumar Yadav that lets site admins bypass the standard login form with a secure URL or a one-time token. It auto-generates one-hour tokens for user accounts and supports custom backdoor URLs. The module streamlines development and staging workflows by reducing repeated logins and session timeouts.

Carlos Ospina warns that Drupal’s standard partnership and sponsorship fees, set at $1,000 and $25,000 respectively, are unaffordable for many professionals in lower-income regions. He uses examples from Colombia’s hotel industry to show how these benchmarks can block participation. Ospina urges rotating board seats for representatives from Asia, Latin America, and Africa to create fee and volunteer models that fit local economies.

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 is seeking volunteers for several committees with deadlines ranging from July 14 to August 5. Roles include marketing & outreach, speaker review, new-user ambassador, and community advocate. Volunteers can earn ticket discounts or free passes based on hours contributed.

DrupalACT's July 2025 meetup will be held on July 30 in Canberra and online. Talks include building Vue web apps on Drupal and setting up local dev environments. The event starts at 5:30 PM AEST and is hosted by Margery Tongway and Michael Richardson.

Noah’s Page Builder has released a major update focused on usability and AI. Key changes include a redesigned interface, undo/redo controls, and integrated AI for content generation and translation. Developer Julián Chabrillón also plans broader Drupal entity support and Simplenews email editing.

Marvin Parsons argues that his improving Custom REST Content Builder lets you go headless in one week with just 13 files, streaming Drupal content via API to a React/TypeScript front end. It supports dynamic pages, bidirectional product relationships and SVG‐driven service pages.

The Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit’s call for speakers closes July 11 at midnight PDT. Proposals in six tracks are open for the October 18–19 conference at McMenamins Edgefield Hotel, with accepted speakers receiving a $25 ticket discount and YouTube recordings of their sessions.

On Thursday, October 16, 2025 from 09:15–10:00 CEST at the Austria Center Vienna, Imre Gmelig Meijling, Janne Kalliola and Michel van Velde will present the Drupal Business Survey 2025, offering data-driven insights into global market segments, Drupal CMS adoption, AI integration and the effects of geopolitical shifts on service providers. Advanced-level business owners and executives can engage in high-level discussions and networking before the annual Drupal Business Dinner.

Dries Buytaert proposes a content-licensing marketplace to let creators set terms and receive automated payments when AI firms use their work. The platform would combine a stock-photo style upload system with programmatic pricing to eliminate unrestricted scraping and manual deals. This aims to solve the “AI extraction problem” and reward creators fairly while sustaining the open web.

Lullabot has been named Tech Company of the Year at the 2025 Netty Awards. The award honors its work in open-source platforms and scalable web infrastructure. Lullabot stood out among firms from over 40 countries for its contributions to technology standards.

A new Drupal module, Partytown Drupal, brings the Partytown JavaScript library into the Drupal ecosystem. It helps shift third-party scripts into web workers to improve performance. The module is now available under a modified name due to a namespace conflict.

Ramsalt Lab has appointed Robin Caers, formerly head of a multidisciplinary Drupal team at NSI, as its new CEO to sharpen customer focus and drive growth across Europe. Co-founder Martin Normann Lund will transition to Chairman of the Board, while co-founder Yngve W. Bergheim shifts to concentrate on strategy and business development. These leadership changes aim to strengthen the organization, improve service delivery, and boost client responsiveness.

The Drupal Association announced the Drupal AI Strategic Initiative at the AI Summit during London Tech Week 2025. It brings together organizations to provide funding and full-time contributors for common AI foundations. The effort builds on the existing AI module and abstraction layer to ensure new features stay compatible across the Drupal platform.

In Part 2 of the “Using Automated Testing Kit in Your Project” series, André Angelantoni, Founder and CTO of Performant Labs, outlines what’s included in the Automated Testing Kit and how to install it. The kit delivers Drupal-focused smoke tests built with Cypress and Playwright, plus helper functions, Drupal hooks, and pre-flight checks. It also includes Testor, a CLI tool for storing, categorizing, and sanitizing snapshots on S3-compatible or SFTP servers.

Version 1.2 of the Bill of Lading module for Drupal is now out. It adds support for listing only custom fields tied to entities and bundles. The update improves site inventory clarity, especially for audits and migrations.

Alejandro Madrigal will host an online session on Friday, July 4, 2025, from 9:30 to 11:30 AM CST. The event, “Creating a Drupal contrib module using Claude Code,” will demonstrate how Anthropic’s Claude Code can speed up Drupal contrib module development. Attendees will see practical examples using Mercury Editor and SDC, learn form-alter strategies for display selector components, and watch a live test of the generated module.

The DropTimes social media manager Chinju Prakash has won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award 2024 for Translation for her Malayalam rendition of Gioconda Belli’s memoir El país bajo mi piel (published as എന്റെ രാജ്യം, എന്റെ ശരീരം), a work celebrated for its lyrical depth, emotional resonance, and faithful preservation of the original’s cultural nuances.

Drupal 10.5.1 is out, with bug fixes to boost stability and performance. It's a recommended update for all sites on the 10.5.x branch. Also, Drupal 10.3.x is now end-of-life—users should upgrade for continued security.

A call for speakers is open for a government open source event on 29 January 2026 in Brussels. The event highlights Drupal use in the public sector and welcomes global participation. Sessions should focus on digital services, policy, and innovation with open tech.

Tag1 Consulting has upgraded its Drupal 7 Extended Support to include Apache Solr 8.x and 9.x. This brings modern Solr support to the Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr modules. The update boosts security and removes the need to run outdated Solr versions.

North Dakota State University launched a unified Drupal-powered platform that consolidates nearly 300 legacy websites into a single recruitment hub. Four Kitchens led the rebuild, using Drupal and Emulsify with AI-enhanced vanilla JavaScript to achieve up to 99 Lighthouse scores and a 0.5-second first contentful paint. A Web Principals initiative trained over 150 content editors on Layout Paragraphs tools, while accessibility and SEO enhancements ensure compliance and improved visibility.

Axelerant has introduced a composable MACH platform using Drupal 11 as a headless CMS and Next.js front ends to manage multiple branded websites from a single content repository. The solution leverages microservices, cloud-native containers, API-first endpoints (JSON:API/GraphQL), and AI-assisted editorial tools for unified previews and multilingual workflows. Early adopters, including a European education consortium and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, reported streamlined governance, a 49 % SEO uplift, and 38 % faster site responsiveness.

Drupal has proposed a Minimum Viable Product for a new Site Template Marketplace and is asking for community feedback by July 13. The MVP will include up to 15 templates and be tested at DrupalCon Vienna and Chicago. Only Certified Partners can submit templates during this phase, and a final decision is expected after a board vote on July 24.

Several Drupal events are lined up this week, including meetups in Lake Constance, the Pacific Time zone, and Pune. LocalGov Drupal Camp 2025 is happening Thursday with a focus on public sector collaboration. Plus, Laracon 2025 is on the radar for PHP developers, taking place later in July.